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Comment by JamesAdir | Hacker News Reader

The UI is horrible and it has already been discussed in many places, but to me the slowness is the no.1 problem. I thought it was just a hiccup when they had it on optional mode, but now it's plain slow. I've tried on different connections and different browsers and they all seem to generate the same result. Super slow loading times of the interface and the emails. I still remember when gmail was the fastest kid on the block or when they've optimized chrome for a faster gmail. But now I'm really looking into alternatives. Last week I've switched from chrome to firefox because of the synced login thing, and gmail will be a bit more complex to change instantly but I'll surely find a way.

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Man, last week a friend asked me to set him up with an email account through Dreamhost shared hosting. My first reaction was "who does this anymore" but after 10 minutes passed (he already had a website there) I was sending him IMAP server information and thinking, "I have got to move on something like this, I'll bet it's 200% faster than current GMail." It's not going to be a GSuite-level toolset for him, of course, but wow, simple email like that is a huge portion of my personal use case.

I've done the same. IMAP is great and in the worst case many registrars use round cube for webmail, which is quite decent.

Isn’t spam the main problem nowadays? I find a hosted mail unusable without some spamfilter in front that is either costly or comes with your corporate accounts.

I don't think so. I was using a selfhosted email for years and never had any problems with spam. You just need to configure your email services to use some DNS block lists like those: zen.spamhaus.org bl.spamcop.net and so on. Also, setup DMARC and SPF entries for your domain. https://dmarc.org/

I have been using self hosted email for two years, spam, I have received < 5 spam emails targeted to my personal email address. Last spammy email was in February. Those mails were impersonating a read friend of mine and real people we both knew or they knew were in CC.

I did receive:

- several spam emails by week until May on another domain I host (at info@<domain> and contact@<domain>, easy to filter out)

- one spam last month at info@<mypersonaldomain>, also easy to filter out.

All of these spammy emails came from OVH IPs.

It's interesting to see that I haven't received any spam to personalized email addresses I give to stuff that need an email for registration so far.

edit: actually, I just received a spammy email at info@<domain>. So weird. Not from OVH this time.

I've been on a shared-host IMAP server for 20 years. I use my own domains and Tbird or another IMAP client. The host has excellent spam filtering (spam assassin & procmail) and doesn't spy on me. I even use gmail (but rarely) through an IMAP client. That way I never have to see their web UI.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> and doesn't spy on me

How do you know this ?

Do you mind giving the name of the shared hosting?

For your use, may I suggest cheaper and better options from the privacy angle? Here are some email providers that check both these boxes:

Posteo.de

Mailfence

Runbox

Mailbox.org

If the UI is your only concern, why not try one of the hundreds of native email clients available for whatever operating system you may be running? I haven’t used Google’s web interface in years.

It could be a hardware thing though, that your GPU can't make use of hardware acceleration.

It's hilarious and sad that we should need GPU hardware acceleration for email.

That is a ridiculous requirement for an email webapp.

When an email client needs hw acceleration, they are doing it wrong.

I challenge you to name a single mail client which doesn't use graphics hardware acceleration in some form.

Even an old fashioned DOS computers console display modes are graphics acceleration - that's why it doesn't have to draw the fonts pixel by pixel - the graphics hardware gets them out of a ROM in real-time.

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